[issue40542] path environment variable not created correctly

[Steve Dower]

Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> added the comment:

Yes, it is bad behaviour, but it is very upsetting for many people to not have the option. This is why it's disabled by default, and why I regularly discourage people from selecting the option (and quite often get abused for taking the trouble... oh well... that's apparently how open-source life works these days).

If you install just for the current user, it will only appear ahead of the user's own PATH entries, which are stored separately from the system ones and concatenated automatically (unless the whole thing exceeds a certain length, in which case you just lose PATH entries... another reason to avoid it).

Adding to the end of the PATH would leave people broken and confused as any other install of Python would still take precedence. So to minimize breakage, it goes to the front, but the per-user install is the default.

So thanks for the support, but unfortunately we don't have any viable way to move forward on it. Tell people not to add to PATH and to run py.exe instead - which we've been doing for years, but it doesn't really have much effect.

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resolution:  -> not a bug
stage:  -> resolved
status: open -> closed

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue40542>
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